The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming

Monday, February 28, 2005

MASSACHUSETTS GREENIES FALTERING

Massachusetts was once a favorite of the national environmental movement, passing some of the country's strongest laws to protect its air, water, and land. But today, after 15 years of budget cuts, it is failing to deliver key services.

Across the state, the results are apparent: almost $800 million in deferred park maintenance, a shortage of rangers and environmental police officers in state parks, and less attention to identifying hazardous waste sites, keeping streams and rivers clean, monitoring mercury contamination, and cutting levels of acid rain.

Spending on the environment has fallen, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $253 million a year in 1989 to $169 million this year -- a 33 percent drop that "cannot be sustained without significantly increasing risks to public health and the environment," according to an internal state document. The federal government recently fined the state $92,000 for a policy it said encouraged contractors to ignore contaminated waste.

"The message from the governor's office and from the legislative leadership is that environment isn't something to pay attention to anymore," said Jim Gomes, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, an environmental advocacy group. "We still have laws that stack up well compared to the rest of the country, but when we fail to fund them, when we fail to enforce them, and when we fail to give them sufficient management to make sure the promises are fulfilled . . . services suffer."

State officials acknowledge budget cuts have been severe -- but say they were necessary during recessions and as other priorities such as healthcare rose to the top. They say Massachusetts has done the best it can with less money and point to more enforcement actions, stricter air-quality laws for dirty power plants, a stepped-up effort to test for drinking water contaminants such as perchlorate, and a push to redevelop old industrial sites.

"Everyone took cuts through the budget crisis, and the environmental agencies are not immune. It forced all of us to do more with less," said Douglas Foy, secretary of the state Office of Commonwealth Development. He said skyrocketing healthcare costs consume the state's discretionary spending. "Times are tight."

Starting in the 1970s, when the environmental movement first took hold nationally, Massachusetts soon became one of the leading states, passing laws to reduce businesses' dependence on toxic chemicals, identifying new hazardous waste sites, and approving some of the most protective wetlands laws in the country. But after an initial push, observers say, the state became complacent.

"Those bursts of enthusiasm in the late '70s and early '80s have diminished," said Christopher Hardy, director of legislative affairs for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. "There has been a bipartisan collapse in state investment of environmental programs, and it's both the Legislature and executive branch."

It might seem obvious that there should be a lot of ice near the North Pole. But scientists have struggled to explain why there is so much. A new study proposes an explanation.

A sudden fall in the average global temperature 2.7 million years ago caused the Arctic Ocean to freeze, researchers have known. Europe and North America got covered in ice, too. The cooling alone is not enough to explain why so much ice built up and has remained to this day in the far North, however.

Back then, another important climate change occurred. The difference between summer and winter temperatures changed by 13 degrees Fahrenheit (7 Celsius) within just a few centuries, the new research found.

Summer got warmer, and winter got colder. So more water evaporated from the sea during summer, making the air more humid. In turn, more snow fell in winter, and the enhanced frigidity allowed ice to build up.

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

SHRIEK! HYDRO POWER IS NO GOOD EITHER!

But Greenies hate dams anyway

Contrary to popular belief, hydroelectric power can seriously damage the climate. Proposed changes to the way countries' climate budgets are calculated aim to take greenhouse gas emissions from hydropower reservoirs into account, but some experts worry that they will not go far enough.

The green image of hydro power as a benign alternative to fossil fuels is false, says Eric Duchemin, a consultant for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "Everyone thinks hydro is very clean, but this is not the case," he says.

Hydroelectric dams produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, and in some cases produce more of these greenhouse gases than power plants running on fossil fuels. Carbon emissions vary from dam to dam, says Philip Fearnside from Brazil's National Institute for Research in the Amazon in Manaus. "But we do know that there are enough emissions to worry about."

In a study to be published in Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Fearnside estimates that in 1990 the greenhouse effect of emissions from the Curuá-Una dam in Pará, Brazil, was more than three-and-a-half times what would have been produced by generating the same amount of electricity from oil.

This is because large amounts of carbon tied up in trees and other plants are released when the reservoir is initially flooded and the plants rot. Then after this first pulse of decay, plant matter settling on the reservoir's bottom decomposes without oxygen, resulting in a build-up of dissolved methane. This is released into the atmosphere when water passes through the dam's turbines.

But it is plain to see that both warming and cooling occurred numerous times before the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, all the dire predictions of global-warming consequences - sea-level rise, for example - have happened in the past. In fact, the greatest warming period was when dinosaurs walked the land (about 70 million to 130 million years ago). There was then five to 10 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today, and the average temperature was 4-11 degrees Celsius warmer. Those conditions should have been very helpful to life, since they permitted those immense creatures to find an abundance of food and they survived.

The Cretaceous was an intense "greenhouse world" with high surface temperatures. These high temperatures were due to the much higher level of CO2 in the atmosphere at the time - four to 10 times as much as is in our air today. The biota was a mixture of the exotic and familiar - luxuriant green forests of now-extinct trees flourished within the Arctic Circle and dinosaurs roamed. The global sea level was at its highest ever during this period, peaking during the Late Cretaceous around 86 million years ago. It is certain that the global sea level was well over 200 meters higher during this time than it is today. The Earth was immensely hotter, the CO2 vastly more plentiful, and the sea levels much higher than they are today.

The Earth has also been immensely colder, the CO2 much less plentiful, and the sea levels much lower than today. Fifteen thousand years ago, the sea level was at least 90 meters lower than it is today. The land looked bare because it was too cold for beech and oak trees to grow. There were a few fir trees here and there. No grass grew, however, just shrubs, bushes and moss grass. In the northern parts of North America, Europe and Asia there was still tundra. The animals were different from today too. Back then there were woolly mammoth, woolly rhinos, cave bears (the former three now extinct), bison, wolves, horses, and herds of reindeer like modern-day reindeer.

The major "sin" for the global warmists is CO2. The Kyoto treaty is meant to reduce the amount of this gas so as, they say, to reduce the degree of warming and eventually return us to some stable climate system. If we look at the historical situation, however, this is cause for alarm. For one thing, there has never been a stable climate system. For another, the level of CO2 in our atmosphere is near its historic low. In the long run, the greatest danger is too little rather than too much CO2. There has been a long-term reduction of CO2 throughout the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth. If this tendency continues, eventually our planet may become as lifeless as Mars.

Glaciation has prevailed for 90% of the last several million years. Extreme cold. Biting cold. Cold too intense for bikinis and swimming trunks. No matter what scary scenarios global-warming enthusiasts dream up, they pale in comparison with the conditions another ice age would deliver. Look to our past climate. Fifteen thousand years ago, an ice sheet a kilometer and a half thick covered all of North America north of a line stretching from somewhere around Seattle to Cleveland and New York City.

Instead of reducing CO2, we should, perhaps, be increasing it. We should pay the smokestack industries hard dollars for every kilogram of soot they pump into the atmosphere. Instead of urging Chinese to stop using coal and turn instead to nuclear-generated electricity, we should beg them to continue using coal. Rather than bringing us to the edge of global-warming catastrophe, anthropogenic climate change may have spared us descent into what would be the most serious and far-reaching challenge facing humankind in the 21st century - dealing with a rapidly deteriorating climate that wants to plunge us into an ice age. Let's hope Antarctica and Greenland melt. Let's hope the sea levels rise. All life glorifies warmth. Only death prefers the icy fingers of endless winter.

The constant Greenie panic that we are in danger of running out of basic resources is now an old one. Such panics were equally prevalent 30 years ago when I wrote my book Conservatism as Heresy. I have just got around to putting online two chapters from that book which deal with the panic concerned. There is one chapter by a journalist here (also here) and one by an economist here (also here).

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

Saturday, February 26, 2005

GREENIES KILL COWS

The record rains in Southern California have done heavy damage to the dairy industry, killing or sickening cows and leaving herds udder-deep in mud and cold water. Many farmers are watching their cows die from exhaustion and exposure. Dairy farmers said the drenching has cost the Southern California industry at least $38 million in lost milk production, dead and sickened animals, and damage to holding ponds and other flood-control features on their farms. In many cases, the farmers are unable to do much to remove the standing water, because of strict environmental laws regulating dairy-farm runoff, which is usually fouled with manure. "We have nowhere to go with the water, the ground is soaked. Our dairies aren't designed to deal with this," said Art Marquez, a third-generation dairy farmer in this community about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. Marquez has 2,000 cows at two dairies and said he has lost at least $2,000 a day to the rain over the past few weeks.

Normally, the region receives about 14 inches of rain in the entire winter season, but this year it has registered more than 30 inches since October, he said.

Cows produce less milk when they have to expend so much energy slogging through water. Also, cows resist lying down in standing water and will stand for days in the soggy muck until they collapse — and sometimes die — from exhaustion. In a normal rainy season, each dairy farmer in the region usually loses about two cows a month to exhaustion and disease. The 250 dairies this year in the region are losing about a cow a day.

Some 19,000 of the world's scientists and experts on climatology have signed declarations saying that blaming rising CO2 levels on mankind is garbage – junk science at its worst – and they insist that all the available evidence proves their contention. In fact, the global warmiacs couldn't be further from the truth. As I argued in my January 13 column, Let Eyes See and Ears Hear, and in my 1997 investigative report, "Global Warming or Globaloney," high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are indeed a dire warning that something very unpleasant is about to befall our planet and those of us who reside here, but it has nothing to do with global warming. Precisely the opposite: It is both the harbinger and the cause of a coming new ice age.

Now comes Robert W. Felix, who in his book "Not by Fire but by Ice" argues persuasively that it is not global warming but ocean warming that is pushing CO2 levels through the roof. Moreover, those skyrocketing levels of CO2 are bringing on a new ice age, which is sitting at our front door right now. Here's how he puts it: "If today's rising carbon dioxide levels are caused by humans, then what caused the dramatic rise in CO2 levels at the dinosaur extinction? Research shows that there was 'a sudden and dramatic rise' in carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere at the dinosaur extinction of 65 million years ago. ... [T]oday's rise in CO2 levels can be attributed to our warming oceans. After all, the oceans are known as a carbon dioxide 'sink,' especially when the water is cold. But as the water warms up, it releases CO2 into the atmosphere. This happens in much the same way that a warm bottle of home-brewed root beer will release CO2. And if you give that CO2 no way to escape, the bottle will explode. We've got it backwards. We've got cause and effect in reverse. The CO2 is not causing global warming. Instead, our warming oceans are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. It's not global warming, it's ocean warming, and it's leading us into an ice age."

According to Felix, the oceans are warming as the result of widespread underwater volcanic activity, which he thoroughly documents. He adds that "We've forgotten that this isn't the first time our seas have warmed. Sea temperatures also shot upward 10º to 18ºF just prior to the last ice age. As the oceans warmed, evaporation increased. The excess moisture then fell to the ground as giant blizzards, giant storms and floods (Noah's Deluge type floods), and a new ice age began." And he warns, "The same thing is happening today. Underwater volcanic activity in the Arctic Ocean far stronger than anyone ever imagined! German-American researchers have discovered more hydrothermal activity at the Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Ocean than anyone ever imagined. The Gakkel Ridge is a gigantic volcanic mountain chain stretching beneath the Arctic Ocean. With its deep valleys 5,500 meters beneath the sea surface and its 5,000-meter-high summits, Gakkel Ridge is far mightier than the Alps.

Two research icebreakers, the USCGC Healy from USA and the German PFS Polarstern, recently joined forces in the international expedition AMORE (Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge Expedition). In attendance were scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and other international institutions. The scientists had expected that the Gakkel Ridge would exhibit 'anemic' magnetism. Instead, they found 'surprisingly strong magmatic activity in the West and the East of the ridge and one of the strongest hydrothermal activities ever seen at mid-ocean ridges.' The Gakkel Ridge extends about 1,800 kilometers beneath the Arctic Ocean from north of Greenland to Siberia, and is the northernmost portion of the mid-ocean ridge system.

To their surprise, the researchers found high levels of volcanic activity. Indeed, magmatism [blazing hot magma flowing from eruptions] was 'dramatically' higher than expected. Hydrothermal hot springs on the seafloor were also far more abundant than predicted. 'We expected this to be a hydrothermally dead ridge, and almost every time our water measurement instrument came up, they showed evidence of hydrothermal activity, and once we even "saw" an active hot spring on the sea floor,' said Dr. Jonathan Snow, the leader of the research group from Munich's Max Planck Institute in a 2003 press release.

Researchers found that "Naturally occurring bubbles of liquid carbon dioxide were observed rising from the ocean floor," according to the Associated Press. "For the first time ever, scientists using a camera-equipped submarine have been able to witness an undersea volcano during an eruptive episode. Exploring the ocean floor in an area known as the Mariana Trench, last year researchers found bubbles of liquid carbon dioxide being released into the sea, enlarging up to a thousand times and turning to gas as they drifted upward."....

"Worldwide flood activity is the worst since before Christopher Columbus. In Poland, it's the worst in several thousand years. In the U.S., precipitation has increased by more than 20 percent just since 1970. This is no coincidence. When that precipitation begins falling in the winter, you have the makings of an ice age."

Felix emphasizes that the record proves that we are on on the verge of the onset of a new ice age. "Ice ages begin and end abruptly every 11,500 years. First comes an enormous flood, a Noah's Deluge type of flood, which ends the previous ice age. Then comes a period of warmth similar to today's ... which lasts about 11,500 years. Then the next ice age begins – catastrophically. "That 11,500-year cycle of warmth followed by an ice age has returned like clockwork for millions of years. To hope it won't happen again just because humans now inhabit this planet would be wishful thinking."

At a January 28 AEI-Brookings Joint Center event, bestselling author, medical doctor, and Emmy and Oscar recipient Michael Crichton addressed the quality of science employed in environmental policy--a topic he explores in his latest novel, State of Fear.

Crichton discussed how to ensure that unbiased information reaches those responsible for environmental policymaking. He recalled the use of a 1998 study as the foundation for the third environmental assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, despite a lack of independent review. This study estimated temperatures from 1000 A.D. to the present, yet Crichton pointed out that it omitted the so-called medieval warm period and the "little ice age that occurred during the sixteenth century," among other flaws. The public mistakenly perceives that studies of this sort are independently verified. To help ensure better quality information, Crichton recommended that competing theories be openly debated, that multiple laboratories perform research to ensure a range of opinions, and that scientists be held accountable for their research.

Because of the uncertainties of current climate science, Crichton urged makers of environmental policy to pay greater attention to epidemiological studies. Crichton also noted that policymakers must judge the efficiency of preventative methods versus methods of adaptation, arguing that there are cases such as oil slicks, radiation leaks, and exposure to pathogens when prevention works better but that that is not necessarily always the case.

He also highlighted the failures of policymakers to promote desirable technologies, arguing that only two major government-sponsored pushes for technology have proven successful in the United States: the Manhattan Project and efforts to land on the moon. Using California as an example, he contended that, rather than adopting the very expensive goal of making electric cars constitute 10 percent of all new cars by 2004, taxpayers would have been better served by policies to raise the price of gasoline, force older cars from the road, or formulate land policies that discourage long commutes.

Crichton also considered the methods for managing complex natural systems that are inherently resistant to control. He noted that many scientists promoted the now-discredited "balance of nature" theory, which held that natural spaces could only be preserved by preventing human intrusion whenever possible. This is not always the case, however, as he predicted that "if you leave a forest alone, probably what'll happen is, it'll decay, become filled with pests, and burn down." Historically, native peoples in the New World set portions of the plains and entire old-growth forests ablaze, yet today California contains more old-growth forests than in 1850, thereby demonstrating that human contact did not destroy forests and that "imposing intellectual notions on a landscape that, by the way, doesn't care what we think," is often untenable.

Today, according to Crichton, we need to continue gathering information and considering unexpected consequences rather than locking into theories with little or questionable scientific basis. After all, he spoke of science as "a process of discovery that goes on for a very long period of time, over the course of which we should adapt to new information. Ultimately," he declared, "I would really like to get the political psychodrama out of decision making."

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

Friday, February 25, 2005

Windfarms are great -- for other people. So any excuse will do to stop them when the REAL people (Greenies and Lefties) might have to put up with having them around ruining the view

A report released yesterday by opponents of the proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound claims that nearly 80 percent of the 130 turbines would be in water deep enough to be vulnerable to a strike by a tanker. The result, the group says, could be a spill severely affecting the Nantucket Sound ecosystem. The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound commissioned an oil-spill assessment in response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the Cape Wind Energy Project that was released last November. The oil-spill assessment was conducted by Lighthouse Technical Consultants and The McGowan Group.

The public and other interested parties, such as the Alliance, have until Thursday to submit a response to the DEIS. The Army Corps is then required to investigate all claims and determine if further research is needed before issuing the final Environmental Impact Statement. Alliance assistant executive director Audra Parker said the group expects an approximately 800-page report will be submitted Thursday to the Army Corps that will include their questions on air quality impacts, aesthetics, economics, wildlife and other issues.

The portion of the report released yesterday dealt with oil spill impacts and said that the Corps failed to assess the worst-case scenario in terms of oil spills, as required by law. The report said that the most probable scenario involved the MV Great Gull, which carries up to 1.3 million gallons of fuel oil and petroleum products to Nantucket, striking one or more of the turbines. They estimate that such a collision would rupture two cargo tanks on the vessel, spilling 380,000 gallons of fuel into the sound.

The report estimated that a spill of that magnitude would cover 425 square miles of the sound's surface water and coat 217 miles of coastline. Impacts would be worst on Horseshoe Shoal, site of the wind farm, but would also hit Nantucket Sound communities, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and portions of the Atlantic Ocean and Elizabeth Islands.

Army Corps spokesman Lawrence Rosenberg disputed the claim that the turbines are vulnerable to being hit by any deep-draft vessel such as a tanker. "It's quite impossible for a large-keeled vessel to get close enough to strike one of the towers," he said yesterday. Rosenberg said shoals around most towers protect them. With depths of three to six feet, Rosenberg said a large ship would go aground before reaching any of the turbines.....

Rosenberg said that towers in deeper water are not easily accessible. "Some of the depths go to 20 feet, but you would have to be one hell of a navigator to get to them," he said. "These are not new issues. They have been looked at," said Cape Wind spokesperson Mark Rodgers. "I don't believe there is a recorded instance of oil barges going through that channel having lost control and driving into the shoals."

HOW IMPORTANT to the world's future is the Kyoto global-warming pact that went into effect Wednesday? It can't be that important when Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, told the Washington Post, "The greatest value is symbolic." Symbolic is the word. Kyoto won't reduce emissions in America because this country never ratified Kyoto. What's more, negotiators at Kyoto in 1997 had to know the United States never would ratify the pact. Before Vice President Al Gore left to attend the Kyoto summit, the Senate voted 95-0 in favor of a resolution that warned that the Senate would not support a global- warming pact that exempted developing nations such as China and India. Kyoto won't make a difference in those developing nations because they don't have to reduce emissions, or even agree to curb how much their pollution grows. While 141 countries ratified the pact, Kyoto's emission caps only apply to some 35 countries.

Kyoto won't result in big greenhouse gas reductions in Europe. The Kyoto pact required Europe to reduce its emissions to 8 percent below its 1990 levels by 2012 and the United States by 7 percent below 1990 levels. That makes it seem as if Europe has a tougher mandate, except the baseline year chosen, 1990, was rigged to help Europe. The year 1990 preceded the shutdown of coal-spewing smokestacks in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. By 1997, many European countries already had met their Kyoto target. When the race started, some European nations were already at the finish line.

Claussen noted on the phone Thursday that some European countries are now exceeding their goals and will have to work to meet them. Allow me to interject that they'll be struggling despite their humongous head start.

President Clinton clearly understood Kyoto was poison. He never asked the Senate to ratify it. More important, Clinton never pushed for meaningful legislation to reduce emissions. When Clinton left office, emissions were on the rise -- they had reached a whopping 14 percent above 1990 levels. As Claussen noted, Team Clinton was "no different in substance than the current administration."

Claussen explained that she believes Kyoto is important because it establishes a global "statement of will" to reduce greenhouse gases. But Kyoto is "symbolic," she added, because it doesn't begin to address by how much emissions would need to be reduced to stop global warming. Greenhouse-gas emissions would need to be as low as 50 percent of 1990 levels to address human-induced global warming, albeit in 50 to 75 years. Other enviros have argued that much steeper reductions are needed -- one science biggie said "40 successful Kyotos" are needed.

The Bush administration estimates Kyoto would cost the United States 5 million jobs and $400 billion annually. Even if that figure is inflated, I don't know many Americans who want to lose their job for a symbol, or a first step. And it doesn't help that the global-warming debate has been distorted by politics. I am a global-warming agnostic. I think that warming may well be human- induced, but I am skeptical of the doomsday scenarios, and I don't trust people who use the issue as a club against America itself (and George W. Bush). I don't trust the zealots (like Gore) to pick the best remedies, after they misrepresent the science. ....

The Kyoto crowd has to get real, however. Be honest with the American people about how much change is involved. Admit that the science is not clear, and even scientists who recognize global warming as human-induced vary widely in what they see as the remedy. While Europe blames President Bush for the demise of Kyoto, I blame Kyoto negotiators for passing a document that wasn't a pact to spread the pain universally, but a pitchfork aimed at the U.S. economy. They call themselves sophisticates, but they negotiated like Madame Defarge.

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

OIL DRILLING SAFE

A major oil spill from a tanker is the main danger to the Arctic environment if oil exploration increases in the region, not drilling which is increasingly clean, the author of an eight-nation survey said. "Shipping has always had risk associated with it, mariners have known that for centuries. There is no such thing as a safe ship -- the Titanic was one," said Dennis Thurston, one of two lead writers of the study, due to be published next year. "The fear is that an increased search for oil is going to impact the Arctic, but the experience we've had is that activity has already peaked," he told Reuters in an interview Friday.

The survey of potential impacts from oil and gas exploration in the Arctic is part of a wider Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, sponsored by the United States, Russia, Canada and the five Nordic nations. Norway has lifted a ban on drilling in the little-explored Barents Sea as oilfields further south have begun to mature, and the U.S. government wants Congress to approve drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to boost oil supplies.

Thurston said the study will recommend that countries improve their plans for coordinating handling of a major oil spill in the Arctic seas. "Three things happen with a big spill: there's a lot of death of animals, there's the long-term effects with oil persisting in the environment and there's the psychological effect," he said. "Seeing a pristine area covered in oil changes policy, people's perceptions, and it's certainly bad for the oil business," he added. Scientists said last month effects still lingered in Alaska from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

Experts gathered in Helsinki for a three-day working meeting have found that most environmental damage in the Arctic due to oil and gas exploration occurred in previous decades, with new technology now permitting less drilling and low pollution. "The way people act in the Arctic has changed a lot. (Exploration) is a lot cleaner, it's a lot smaller and it's more focused. The activity level is going down even if the search for oil is ramping up," Thurston said. He said he believed Norway's decision to lift the drilling ban in the Barents Sea, which prompted loud protests from environmental groups, was unlikely to cause damage. "The technology is really safe and there's been a tremendous amount of risk assessment done on the Arctic projects. Personally I think they are safe operations," he said. "The question is transportation of the product, especially with tankers, because there's so much more human error potential," he added.

While the entire northeast of the United States was digging out from a huge blizzard-usually a sign of cold weather-a meeting on "the climate challenge" was occurring in London, England and "an independent report" by the Institute for Public Policy Research (Great Britain), The Australia Institute, and the Center for American Progress announced that "an ecological time bomb is ticking away" that will plunge the world into chaos due to the heat said to be generated by greenhouse gas emissions.

This kind of lunacy is intended to impose caps on the use of energy everywhere. It is the goal of the United Nations Kyoto Climate treaty that became international law as of Wednesday, February 16. There is no ecological time bomb. There is no need for urgent action.

To understand what "caps" really are, let me quote from my friend, John Brignell, a British professor emeritus, statistician, and editor of Numberwatch.com. Recalling Martin Luther's rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church over the issue of indulgences, he reminds us, "Chaucer's Pardoner earned one hundred marks a year by selling indulgences, worthless pieces of paper, relics and other valueless items to credulous believers in the religion of the day. Now we have carbon trading, in which new worthless pieces of paper are sold for millions of pounds." That is the essence of the Kyoto protocol, a system by which meaningless trading of forbidden emissions are sold for the right to continue contributing to the dreaded and totally bogus global warming.

While an army of snowplows was at work on the roads of the Garden State, the little Green gnomes in the Department of Environmental Protection were working to reclassify carbon dioxide (CO2) as a "contaminant." If this becomes law, the DEP might as well arrest everyone living in the Garden State because humans generate CO2 every time they exhale. Or perhaps we will just pay for the right to exhale?

To bring about the implementation of the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, something the US Senate unanimously rejected and the President has correctly said is based on "flawed science", New Jersey in concert with other northeastern States has entered into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that would, if enacted, impose a "regional CO2 cap-and-trade program."

To achieve this, CO2 has to be reclassified as a "contaminant", i.e., a form of pollution! This is yet another example of the way environmentalists-Greens-are seeking to do an end-run around the rejection and opposition to their bogus "global warming" claims. Aside from the fact that they use junk science to advance their lies, this is yet one more example of their unrelenting efforts to harm the health and welfare of everyone worldwide who would suffer the consequences of this hoax. And, yes, enough nations have ratified the Kyoto Protocol to theoretically impose its demands to cut back on CO2 emissions, but among those exempt from its mandates are China and India, plus a host of Third World nations, thus rendering it meaningless.

In late January, Dr, Marlo Lewis, Jr., Ph.D., a Senior Fellow in Environmental Policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, exposing the abject lies and idiotic justifications it is offering for its proposed reclassification of CO2 as "an air contaminant." The hearings and written comments on this proposal are under cover. What happens next is up to the DEP.

Dr. Lewis stated his objections more politely than I ever could and I will excerpt them here so you can make up your own mind. "The proposed rule is a conceptual muddle. Logically, DEP cannot classify CO2 as an `air contaminant' unless it is prepared to apply the same designation to water vapor-the atmosphere's main greenhouse gas." In other words, if DEP pulls off this deception, it would presumably also have to designate steam from the State's nuclear power plants or just plain old water evaporation from public green spaces.

DEP is lying through its teeth, citing some of the most dubious junk science available. "The proposed rule lacks a credible scientific rationale," is the nice way Dr. Lewis put it. "There is no solid evidence that CO2 emissions are causing, or are likely to cause, `dangerous interference' with the global climate system. On the contrary, the balance of evidence suggests that CO2 emissions are greening the planet, enhancing biodiversity and making global food available."

In the event no one taught you this fundamental fact about life on planet Earth, all the forests and every form of vegetation, including food crops, is utterly and completely dependent on the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere. More CO2 is good. Less CO2 is bad. More enhances plant growth. Less decreases it.

In brief, the agency's arguments are based on the extremely dubious reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is the same UN that is responsible for the now infamous "Oil for Food" program imposed on Saddam Hussein that became a cesspool of corruption.

Suffice it to say, the IPCC has routinely revised its various projections of global warming, each time it was correctly attacked for (1) being based on flawed computer models and (2) its failure to demonstrate any verifiable justification for its claims. "Flawed" is a nice way of saying that, were the IPCC a casino, every slot machine would be rigged to never provide a payoff.

Right now, the NJDEP is claiming that, not only will New Jersey resemble Florida if they can't reclassify CO2, but that the State's beautiful shoreline will sink below a rapidly rising ocean. The only problem is that no observational data, including satellite altimetry, shows any evidence this is occurring. One leading scientist in this field called the IPCC data "untenable" and "impossible." As for air pollution, all the data points to major improvements since 1975 and, of course, there are plenty of laws already in place to insure the continuing reduction of pollution.

Finally, the DEP's regional cap-and-trade program will prove hugely expensive. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that the Kyoto Protocol, if implemented here, would cost the U.S. between $77 billion and $283 billion annually, depending on the extent of international emissions trading. Says Dr. Lewis, "Kyoto is all economic pain for no environmental gain. The same holds for any lesser CO2 regulation program."

A study by the Heartland Institute estimates that the DEP proposal would cost consumer and business losses that could reach $12.9 billion if implemented in New Jersey. Indeed, State revenue losses could reach $20.9 billion. Not only is New Jersey already deeply in debt, the NJDEP wants to plunge it even deeper in debt.

Greens, however, don't care about things like that. In fact, anything they can do to harm the economy is part of their statewide and worldwide agenda. Anything they can do to cause the needless deaths of people, denying them DDT or genetically improved seeds for crops, is just fine with them because they think there are too many people living on planet Earth.

Mr. Governor, if you are reading this. Junk the DEP proposal and then fire the Director. If possible, clean house in the DEP and hire some people who aren't certifiably nuts.

When you awoke this morning and looked out the window did you get an exhilarating rush of pride now that the Kyoto Treaty has taken effect? Didn't it make you feel so morally superior to those awful nations who refused to sign on? Did you notice a slight cooling of the ether as the amount of greenhouse gases has begun to shrink, making the world a better, safer place to live? Me neither!

What I did notice was absolutely nothing. Oh, yes, a lot of people were talking, particularly the talking heads in the media, about how exactly the Treaty would benefit mankind. No matter how I look at it, it does not make sense.

Someone please explain to me how we can control greenhouse gases by "purchasing" greenhouse emission credits from countries that have a surplus of these credits. As I understand this Ponzi scheme, if Canadians produced more greenhouse gases than they were allocated under Kyoto, then they could simply "purchase" greenhouse gas credits from another country that has a surplus. Two questions: who decided what a given country's greenhouse gases quota is and how will Canada paying $5 billion to a country like Russia to purchase surplus credit reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? The country that we are purchasing from surely isn't going to spew them into the atmosphere if we don't purchase them. And us purchasing these credits will actually enable us to spew extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Any way I look at it, the Kyoto Treaty appears to be a wealth redistribution scheme dreamed up by Kofi Annan's crew to trim the sails of the West and lend some financial leverage to the Third World. As I see it, we morally superior Canadians are going to lay out billions of dollars to buy--nothing, the perfect Seinfeldian deal.

While climate change has been a bogeyman for the last 40 years, there is at best an array of conflicting claims by scientists that it is indeed happening and at worst, not a shred of evidence to support those claims. Compound this with the assertion that climate change is due to the activities of humans, namely humans living in the Western Hemisphere, and you have what looks to me like an "agenda".

Today every weather anomaly is used to support the claim that catastrophic climate change is in full force. These so-called no-falsifiable hypotheses are rearing their ugly head whenever there is a hurricane or a snowstorm or a flood resulting from a deluge. It's almost as if these phenomena had never occurred before. I recall last fall's Florida hurricanes and how many media commentators claimed that their unusual severity portended evidence of climate change. Obviously these pundits did not know that the 1940s saw the greatest quantity and severity of hurricanes in the past century, which was well before anyone even dreamed about the possibility of catastrophic climate change.

As evidence of global warming, certain scientists are citing today's temperatures being substantially higher than they were 30 years age. True as that may be, it is also true that today's temperature are substantially lower than they were in the 1930s. Does that mean we are now headed for an ice age?

The acronym GIGO, which stands for "garbage in-garbage out", applies equally to all computer-related activities, even those of UN climatologists. Two years ago, two researchers, Ian Castles and David Henderson, both with impeccable credentials in their respective fields, noticed some serious problems with the methodology used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict greenhouse gas emissions for the next century. Henderson, a respected economist and Castles a statistician, have challenged the IPCC's predictions as being unrealistic in their severity.

In signing on to the Kyoto accord, the government of Canada has betrayed its ineptitude both in matters of climatology as well as economics. The fact that there is no clear plan being floated by Ottawa, except some more conferences in the future is perfect evidence our political masters do not have a clue. But that isn't going to stop them from plunging headlong into a scheme that could well result in the most severe economic crisis this country has ever experienced.

Like same-sex marriage, the Kyoto Treaty is yet another ill-advised scheme to which the Liberals are committing this country, whether we like it or not, and consequences be damned

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

WATER: A WARNING FROM MISSOURI

Greenie bureaucrats undermining democracy

The Missouri legislators who approved a water law (HB 1433) in the waning moments of last year's session no doubt thought they were creating something to help protect clean water in a nine-county area. That's what they were told by reputable employees of the state agencies and influential lobbyists from environmental organizations.

The new law created a nine-county district in which water policy would be developed and enforced by appointed – not elected – officials. None realized that the law they adopted was, in fact, an important step toward the implementation of a plan conceived more than 15 years ago by government officials and environmental organizations convened by, and systematically working through, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland.

The plan, generically known as "ecosystem management," is designed to manage natural resources on an "ecosystem" basis, rather than on the basis of arbitrarily drawn state and county political boundaries. Equally important is the transfer of management authority from elected officials to appointed officials. The "watershed" is the primary building block of every ecosystem. HB 1433 successfully designated nine Missouri counties as a watershed and created an appointed body to govern water, the essential ingredient in every ecosystem.

Proponents of the ecosystem management plan make strong arguments about the desirability of managing water resources to assure adequate, safe supplies for future generations. It is absolutely true that water flows are not restricted by political boundaries or property lines. It is easy for politicians to swallow these arguments if no one speaks up for costs and consequences that inevitably follow this kind of management scheme.

Local people are speaking up in Missouri. Russell Wood, head of the Ozarks Chapter of the Property Rights Congress, and Ray Cunio, president of Missouri's Citizens for Private Property Rights, are leading an effort to repeal HB 1433. More than 200 local citizens packed a restaurant where a meeting was held to discuss the merits of HB 1433 and the efforts to repeal it. State Rep. Dennis Wood, a proponent of the water district, explained that the legislation provided low-cost loans to people who would be required to upgrade their septic systems. An unidentified lady said in response: "Why can't you understand? We don't want your 'help.' We don't need your law! Why can't you get that?"

Aside from the particular regulations and fines imposed by the water district law, the larger question is one that faces virtually every community in the nation: Who shall govern – elected officials, or appointed professionals? The only way a government of, for and by the people can be controlled by the people is to throw the elected bums out of office when they enact laws or policies the people don't want. When policies that carry the weight of law are enacted and enforced by appointed professionals, the people no longer have the means to control their government.

Across the nation, watershed councils, historic districts, heritage areas, scenic highway commissions, rural development authorities, regional transportation boards, area planning councils and numerous other "multi-jurisdictional" authorities are emerging to diminish or remove policy-making authority from elected officials and transfer that authority to appointed government bureaucrats.

These agency professionals are often members of national associations of agency professionals that regularly participate in conferences convened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Six federal agencies are dues-paying members of this organization, as are most of the national environmental organizations. The IUCN is the source of virtually every international environmental treaty in the last 30 years as well as the author of Agenda 21 and numerous other international environmental agreements and policies.

When the Kyoto Treaty enters into force on February 16, the global warming community will undoubtedly congratulate itself: to do good they have secured the most expensive worldwide treaty ever. They have succeeded in making global warming a central moral test of our time. They were wrong to do so.

Global warming is real and is caused by emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). But existing climate models show we can do little about it. Even if everyone (including the United States) applied the Kyoto rules and stuck to them throughout the century, the change would be almost immeasurable, postponing warming for a mere six years in 2100 while costing at least $150 billion a year.

Global warming will mainly harm developing countries, because they are poorer and therefore less able to handle climate changes. However, by 2100, even the most pessimistic forecasts from the UN expect the average person in the developing countries to be richer than now, and thus better able to cope. So Kyoto is basically a costly way of doing little for much richer people far in the future. We need to ask ourselves if this should be our first priority.

Of course, in the best of all worlds, we would not need to choose our priorities. We could do all good things. We could win the war against hunger, end conflicts, stop communicable diseases, provide clean drinking water, improve education and halt climate change. But we can't do everything. So we must ask the hard question: what should we do first?

Some of the world's top economists - including three Nobel Laureates - answered this question at the Copenhagen Consensus last May. They found that dealing with HIV/AIDS, hunger, free trade, and malaria were the world's top priorities, where we could do the most good for our money. Moreover, they put urgent responses to climate change at the bottom of the list. In fact, the panel called these ventures - including Kyoto - "bad projects," because they cost more than the good they do.

As the economics of climate change has become ever clearer, warnings from the global warming community have become shriller. For example, the head of the UN Climate Panel says, "We are risking the ability of the human race to survive." Such statements make headlines, but they are nonsense. For example: At a recent meeting at Exeter in the UK, some participants warned of a 50-50 chance that the Gulf Stream winds could collapse within a century. Such a scenario looks great in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, but it is unsubstantiated. As one presenter at the conference summarized: "No models have shown a complete shutdown, or a net cooling over land areas. Hence a shutdown during the 21st century is regarded as unlikely."

Recently, a coalition of prominent environmental and development organizations claimed that malaria would increase in a warmer world. This has some theoretical validity, but ignores malaria's dependence on poor infrastructure and health care. Indeed, throughout the cold 1500-1800's, malaria was a major disease in Europe, the US, and far into the Arctic Circle. Malaria infections didn't end because it got colder (it actually got warmer), but because Europe and the US got rich and dealt with the problem. With developing countries getting richer over the century, malaria is similarly likely to decrease rather than increase.

But many liberal environmentalists have complained that even Kyoto is too weak to begin addressing their concerns about "global warming." The treaty will only have "symbolic" effect on the global climate, they concede. "I think that everybody agrees that Kyoto is really, really hopeless in terms of delivering what the planet needs," Peter Roderick of Friends of the Earth International told Cybercast News Service in December during the United Nations climate summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. "It's tiny, it's tiny, tiny, it's tiny," Roderick said. "It is woefully inadequate, woefully. We need huge cuts to protect the planet from climate change."

Even without formal American participation in the treaty, many environmentalists are still seeking fossil fuel emission reductions in the U.S. But skeptics of the Kyoto Protocol, gathered at the recent media briefing on Capitol Hill, took aim at the treaty's scientific premise -- that man is creating greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. "The science does not support the kind of apocalyptic vision that is offered by Kyoto advocates," said William O'Keefe of the Marshall institute, an organization that, according to its website, "encourages the use of sound science in making public policy." "The basic theory behind trapping gasses and then warming the earth has not been validated by satellite measurements because the lower atmosphere hasn't warmed," O'Keefe said.

U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) added that "the science used to support Kyoto is collapsing." He also criticized the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, which purports to show Arctic temperatures rising as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. The Arctic report is "a classic case of how to selectively use data," Inhofe charged. "There are numerous scientific problems with the report. It had no footnotes or citations, and worse, it focused only on Arctic climate over the last 30 years. "That's probably because Artic temperatures in the 1930s were higher than they are today," Inhofe said.

He also ridiculed global climate models used to project temperature increases over the next century. "As many in the scientific community know, these models are highly imperfect. They are incapable of replicating the present climate using known climate conditions," Inhofe said.

Ebell noted that while the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 during the Clinton administration, it is President Bush who is absorbing the attacks by liberal environmentalists. "People blame President Bush for walking away from Kyoto. In fact President Clinton never submitted it to the U.S. Senate for ratification," Ebell said. "Even if President Bush did submit [the protocol] for ratification, it would be defeated overwhelmingly," Ebell added. "This treaty has been dead for a long time in this country."

Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute said the reason that approximately 160 countries have joined the U.S. in not supporting the protocol is because the nations fear the treaty more than any potential climate calamity. "Those 160 countries believe that a failure to grow economically is a greater threat than (potential climate change). They believe that the Kyoto Protocol is a greater threat to mankind than climate change," Horner told Cybercast News Service .

Patrick J. Michaels, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, echoes the criticism of the Kyoto Protocol. Claims of human-caused catastrophic "global warming" are "scientifically unfounded," Michaels wrote in a column in Sunday's Washington Times. He labeled Kyoto "an economic weapon, not a climate instrument. "Kyoto is absurd because it does absolutely nothing measurable within the foreseeable future about planetary temperature, while one nation - the United States - bears almost all the cost," Michaels wrote. Michaels is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of a new book "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media." Michaels also wrote that "there is no technologically and politically feasible way to reduce emissions enough to dramatically change the current temperature trajectory ... The only method is to make energy (read: fossil fuel energy) unaffordably expensive."

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

BURYING NUCLEAR WASTE SAFELY

Of course NOTHING is ever safe to the Greens

Nuclear power is the only form of electricity generation that will keep us happy. It does not contribute to global warming. It does not spread itself in ugly swaths across remote hillsides. It is by far the safest form of power generation ever devised. It can satisfy large energy demands from an increasingly energy-hungry world. It reduces dependence on oil supplies from the Middle East. Its own raw material is enormously abundant.

The nub, of course, is the waste. It was waste that got all over Karen Silkwood. It is reprocessing waste that has caused all the problems at Sellafield. It is waste that is focused on by all the anti-nuclearist greens and it is waste that has meant governments have been wary for the past 20 years of doing anything about nuclear power. Waste, though, is not a technical problem, or at least does not need to be. It is a political problem, founded on irrational fears of nuclear power. It is those political fears that have starved research into the technical solutions of the necessary money.

An English geologist has come up with one of the most ingenious ideas yet suggested. Dr Fergus Gibb, a specialist in igneous rocks at Sheffield University who has done mould-breaking research into the beautiful columnar dolerites of the Hebrides, has suggested that the really high-grade nuclear waste should be returned to the earth and allowed, in effect, to melt itself back into the rocks from which the nuclear ores were originally mined.

Gibb's idea has a brilliant circularity about it. The very heat that nuclear material generates, which is at the heart of much of the difficulty of storing the waste at all, could actually be put to use. His idea is to drill enormously deep holes right into the granite of the continental crust, perhaps 5,000 metres down, at the bottom of which it is quite hot anyway: about 900C. Add some canisters of high-level nuclear waste and the whole bottom of the shaft turns molten. The waste is then "engulfed", in Gibb's word, by the surrounding rock, which would resolidify in a matter of weeks. The waste would be entombed for millions of years until erosion would again expose it. By then the nuclear material will have lost its potency. Gibb calls his solution "the granite coffin".

And as for the perennial green wish that people would use less energy: that, more than ever, seems like hoping for rivers to flow uphill. Only nuclear power has the capacity, the responsiveness and the cleanness to address this nest of problems. And Fergus Gibb's granite coffin may well be the key.

SUVs (sports utility vehicles), also known as 4x4s, are big ugly brutes. Politicians are lining up to insult them, to call for more taxes on them and to demand their exclusion from cities. Ken Livingstone thinks that the drivers are "idiots"..... An apparently more soundly-based criticism comes from Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP, who is against SUVs because of their oversize "environmental footprint". The Toyota Land Cruiser has one of the biggest "footprints" of them all, spewing out 277 grammes of carbon dioxide every kilometre.

Shocked? You needn't be. It is not much different from what an ordinary big car produced a decade ago. There has been a wondrous reduction in gas emissions from all cars. But let us assume that Mr Baker truly thinks, as he says he does, that these much-reduced emissions are a serious matter. In that case, Mr Baker must be also, if he is logical, deeply concerned about cows.

A single dairy cow belches and farts 114 kilos of methane a year. It is a methane machine. Methane is far more lethal as a greenhouse gas - assuming that one believes in all this - than carbon dioxide. It is 23 times more potent, although it does not last so long in the atmosphere. The methane produced by a single cow is equivalent to 2,622 kilos of carbon dioxide.

A Toyota Land Cruiser, meanwhile, if driven an average mileage, doles out 3,722 kilos a year. So a cow does 70 per cent of the damage of a Toyota - even more if you add on the methane given off by its manure. Given that a cow does so much environmental damage, anyone sincere about greenhouse gases should be demanding that they are banned or, at the very least, heavily taxed.....

Mr Baker and his ilk should also be demanding the draining of Britain's - and the world's - wetlands. Natural wetlands are an even bigger source of methane than cows. He would harangue farmers in the Third World about their badly-maintained rice paddies. They are number three in the league table of methane production.

He should be calling for the killing of the wildebeest. Wildebeest are ruminants, like cows, and as they migrate across East Africa each year they belch and fart unnumbered tonnes of methane. Yet Mr Baker says nothing about incompetent Third World farmers or killing wildebeest. He is rude only about SUVs. Why? Because his agenda is nothing to do with greenhouse gases. He just hates the rich. It is quite normal to hate the rich. But it is posturing to hate the rich and dress it up as righteous concern for the future of the planet.

The United Nations has not had much to celebrate recently. Perhaps that is why it has made such a fanfare about the Kyoto protocol, the UN-brokered treaty on climate change that comes into force on Wednesday. The agreement requires developed countries to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, which produce the greenhouse gases blamed for causing climate change. The treaty, drawn up in 1997, is widely considered the most important international agreement on environmental issues. But it quickly ran into trouble as developed nations balked at the difficulty of complying with it. The US rejected the treaty as unfair and its future looked in doubt until Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, finally ratified it late last year, after pressure from the European Union. Klaus Toepfer, UN under-secretary general, says: "I'm happy that all these pessimists have been proved wrong. We have proved that in this globalised world there is also the chance of globalised action."

But amid today's celebrations there are signs that key provisions may never work properly. Chief among these is the clean development mechanism, which allows developed countries offset some of their own greenhouse gas emissions by financing projects that cut those in developing nations. In theory, clean development projects cut overall greenhouse gas emissions but there are fears that projects are not gaining approval quickly enough, jeopardising the treaty. Kyoto binds developed nations to cut emission levels by 2012, compared with those of 1990. Recognising that developed countries' emissions are greater than poorer counterparts', the protocol placed reduction targets only on rich countries. But poorer nations are rapidly industrialising, shifting the balance of carbon dioxide output.

The Pew Centre on Global Climate Change, a US-based research organisation, found China was the second-biggest emitter in 2000, responsible for 14.8 per cent of the world's emissions against the US's 20.6 per cent and the EU's 14 per cent. Persuading developing countries to sign up to emissions reduction is difficult. They resent the idea that the developed world grew rich fuelled by coal, oil and gas while they might be denied the chance to do so.

The clean development mechanism allows companies and governments in developed countries to buy emissions reduction "credits" by investing in projects in developing countries that reduce emissions. Curbing the use of fossil fuels requires renewable energy sources--hydroelectricity, wind, wave and tidal power--and in the longer term, developing new power sources, such as hydrogen. Poor countries lack the funds for such investments, so the clean development mechanism helps bring these technologies to the developing world. The World Bank estimates the potential value of clean development investment in the developing world at between $12.5bn and $25bn.

The UN says so few have been approved because companies have been waiting until the Kyoto agreement came into force. Others discern a different reason. Non-governmental organisations feared the clean development mechanism would become a loophole, allowing polluters to continue to pollute at home while claiming credit for foreign projects that would have gone ahead in any case. Hence schemes qualify for clean development status only if their backers can show they would not be viable without the financial investment they will receive as part of the mechanism.

James Cameron, partner at the boutique investment bank Climate Change Capital and a lawyer involved in the protocol negotiations, says everyone failed to recognise that this extra burden vastly reduced the number of projects likely to go ahead. "You are forcing investors in these projects to lie; as they have to tell their financial backers that the projects are going to make lots of money, but you have to tell the [UN] that they wouldn't be financially viable, because then they could have gone ahead anyway," he explains.

He says the clean development mechanism should be redefined at the annual Kyoto meeting in November, likely to be held in Canada, to allow projects that would have been financially viable without the added assistance of the UN. But modifying the protocol is a painful process and time is running out. This stage of Kyoto expires in 2012 but clean development projects need years to come to fruition.

The World Bank estimates it takes about five years to design, finance, gain approval for and build a project, such as a wind farm or geo-thermal plant. Unless many more such projects are rapidly approved, the Kyoto protocol may yet come unstuck.

The UN finally got what it wanted. The Kyoto Climate Change treaty becomes international law this month on Wednesday. The treaty went into full effect with the approval by the Russian Federation, even without the support of the United States. Time will tell if and when the treaty will begin to affect the U.S. economy. What is certain is that truth and reason had no part in the process. Global warming has become a new religion. No one is supposed to question whether it is a fact. I did in the December 2004 issue of The DeWeese Report ("There is no man-made global warming," Volume 10, Issue 12). For my trouble I was labeled a "moron," a "liar;" one who wants to "blow up the world," and just plain "evil" to name a few from a mass of mail I received.

In particular, my article stated that there is no scientific evidence to support claims of man-made global warming. I pointed out that there is division among scientists and that there is no "consensus" among them. I also reported that there are scientists who promote political agendas over truth to keep the grants coming in. And I said that the UN's 1996 report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was edited at the last minute to remove two very important paragraphs that specifically said science showed no clear evidence of man-made climate change. Those were all facts.

Apparently I'm a moron for reporting them because as one letter said, "Everyone knows global warming is real." In response to these Luddites, I simply present this: A federal hurricane research scientist named Chris Landsea has resigned from the UN-sponsored climate assessment team because his group's leader had politicized the process. Landsea said there was little evidence to justify Kevin Trenberth's assertion in October that global warming was responsible for the strong hurricanes experienced this past year and that "the North Atlantic hurricane Season of 2004 may well be a harbinger of the future." Said Landsea in his resignation letter, "It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity had been due to global warming. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy." Landsea closed his resignation letter by saying, "I personally cannot in good faith contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."

There you have it. Two kinds of scientists. One standing for true science based on the facts. The other pushing a political agenda that says science be damned, our global religion is at stake. Global Warming has become a religion that the faithful have vowed to follow no matter what the true facts may show. Global Warming is a theory, nothing more, and large numbers of scientists around the world are beginning to question its validity. There is no consensus of support.

The fact is the Kyoto Protocol will have absolutely no effect on climate change, but the faithful demand that it be implemented anyway, because "we have to do something." In 1990, Timothy Wirth, who later became Bill Clinton's Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs said, "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong we will be doing the right thing."

Global Warming is nothing more than a euphemism for redistribution of wealth from the rich, development nations to jealous dictatorships who refuse to allow their citizens the right to gain their own wealth through free markets. It's about political redistribution from strong, independent sovereign nations into the hands of a power-hungry global elite cowering in the United Nations. These are the same cowardly scoundrels who used to try to rule the world through global communism. Today they pretend that the same lies have something to do with protecting the environment.

The truth is there is no man-made global warming. There's only the scam of an empty global religion designed to condemn human progress and sucker the feeble minded into worldwide human misery. I rest my case. Amen.

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

Monday, February 21, 2005

A GREENIE FAITH-HEALING MEETING

There has just been a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that seems to have focused on propping up the faith of true believers in global warming. The participants were presented with a big selection (with "selection" being the relevant word) of evidence to show that the earth has been warming up in recent years. Some excerpts:

Scientists reported Friday they have detected the clearest evidence yet that global warming is real -- and that human industrial activity is largely responsible for it. Researchers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science cited a range of evidence that the Earth's temperatures are rising:

-- The Arctic regions are losing ice cover.

-- The populations of whales and walrus that Alaskan Eskimo communities depend on for food are crashing.

-- Fresh water draining from ice and snow on land is decreasing the salinity of far northern oceans.

-- Many species of plankton -- the microscopic plants that form the crucial base of the entire marine food web -- are moving north to escape the warming water on the ocean surface off Greenland and Alaska.

Ice ages come and go over millennia, and for the past 8,000 years, the gradual end of the last ice age has seen a natural increase in worldwide temperatures, all scientists agree. Skeptics have expressed doubt that industrial activity is to blame for world's rapidly rising temperatures.

But records show that for the past 50 years or so, the warming trend has sped up -- due, researchers said, to the atmospheric burden of greenhouse gases produced by everything industrial, from power plants burning fossil fuels to gas-guzzling cars -- and the effects are clear. "We were stunned by the similarities between the observations that have been recorded at sea worldwide and the models that climatologists made," said Tim Barnett of the University of California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "The debate is over, at least for rational people. And for those who insist that the uncertainties remain too great, their argument is no longer tenable. We've nailed it."

Barnett and other experts marshaled their evidence and presented it to their colleagues for the first time at a symposium here. For the past 40 years, Barnett said, observations by seaborne instruments have shown that the increased warming has penetrated the oceans of the world - - observations, he said, that have proved identical to computer predictions whose accuracy has been challenged by global-warming skeptics. The most recent temperature observations, he said, fit those models with extraordinary accuracy....

"Ice is in decline everywhere on the planet, and especially in the Arctic, " said Ruth Curry, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, "and there is large-scale drying throughout the Northern Hemisphere."

Ice cores drilled deep into the Greenland ice cap show that salinity of the ice at the upper layers of the cores has decreased sharply due to the incursion of fresh water draining from melting snows on the surface, she reported, and land ice and permafrost are in decline all around the Arctic. In the meantime, she said, measurements show that salinity of the ocean waters nearer the equator has increased as the rate of evaporation of warmer tropical and subtropical oceans quickens.

It may take several centuries for all the ice that covers Greenland to melt, Curry said, "but its release of fresh water will make sea-level rise a very significant issue in this century." In fact, she said, changes in the freshwater balance of the oceans has already caused severe drought conditions in America's Western states and many parts of China and other Asian countries.

But no-one has ever disputed that the earth's temperature rises and falls. The only important question is whether 20th century industry caused any of the current apparent warming. And only one of the above reports appears to offer an answer to that -- the report by oceanographer Barnett. Here is what I said yesterday on "Dissecting Leftism" about the Barnett report:

This report by Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California -- saying that the recent small rise in the earth's temperature can only be explained by man-made gas emissions -- has got an amazing amount of publicity. But the report has yet to be subjected to peer review, let alone be published in an academic journal. It shows how desperate the global warmers have got for any shred of comfort. The language of the author of the report -- that "rational" people could not doubt his conclusions -- has certainly got more to do with Barnum than science. I suppose the amusing part is that the warmers have finally found some real-world data that their models fit. Most real-world data does not. I guess they had to get lucky eventually.

And what sort of a scientific meeting is it that presents only positive evidence in favour of one point of view? It sounds more like a religious revival meeting than a scientific gathering. Or is it just that all the evidence points one way? Far from it. Just look at the next three stories below for starters.

WICKED N.Z. GLACIER GROWS INSTEAD OF SHRINKING!

Three years ago, climate change activists said that a glacier in the deep south of New Zealand was a "global warming casualty," shrinking because of the human impact on global climate patterns. This week, a company that takes visitors over the popular tourist attraction confirmed that the Franz Josef Glacier is in fact advancing, growing several meters by the day, following an unseasonably cool summer in the southern hemisphere.

As the Kyoto Protocol comes into effect around the world on Wednesday, the ebb and flow of the glacier has turned the spotlight once again onto environmentalists' claims. Mark Mellsop, manager of the Franz Josef Glacier Guides company, said the glacier's flow rate in the center was about three meters a day, while the front -- known as the "terminal face" -- was pushing up against a large rockface, spilling over and around it. Within weeks the rock would be completely covered. "We've had a couple of years of very good snowfalls in winter, and we've had a really unusually cold summer -- about the coldest in New Zealand for 60 years, " he said. "Those things have all come together to cause the glacier to push forward. "This isn't particularly unusual; it's just that in general glaciers are retreating around the world. People find this unusual because of the general stories of global warming."

Mellsop said a change in weather had both an immediate and longer-term effect on the glacier, which is visited by 60,000 people a year. In the short term, cooler temperatures slow down melting and snow increases the flow-rate. "Beyond that, there's also a downstream effect. If you have heavy snowfalls one year, you're likely to get increased volumes of ice coming down the glacier three-to-five years later."

Mellsop said the 11 kilometer-long glacier was steeper than most, and was therefore "very, very sensitive to climate change." Until the end of the 20th century the glacier advanced for 15 years. Between 1999 and 2003 it retreated before recently starting to advance again. Asked whether he thought the gloomier predictions of green activists were likely to bear out, Mellsop said "only if the people who are talking about climate are accurate.".....

In 2002, Greenpeace declared that Franz Josef was a "global warming casualty." "Warmer temperatures and altered snow and rain patterns from climate change are resulting in the retreat of glaciers the world over," a climate campaigner for the group said at the time. Robbie Kelman made it clear where Greenpeace placed the blame for this: "Increased temperatures brought about by greenhouse polluting gases like methane and the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, are destroying glaciers. Unless we break our addiction to fossil fuels, we risk the wholesale destruction of glaciers."

No one denies that the Franz Josef glacier both advances and retreats and that weather patterns play a role, but problems arise when a link is drawn with claims that the world's climate is steadily and dangerously rising. "Glaciers advance and retreat not only because of temperature but also because of precipitation," Prof. Chris de Freitas of the School of Geography and Environmental Science at Auckland University said Wednesday. "Just because a glacier or group of glaciers is doing one thing or another -- whether advancing or retreating -- doesn't mean to say it's an indicator of global climate. It's an indicator of regional climate variability, and to link it to global climate change is absurd."

Pointing to another favorite argument of the activists, de Freitas said there was a small part of the Antarctic Peninsula that showed warming, and the current speculation was that this was a result of warming currents. "But the vast majority of the Antarctic continent is actually cooling. To say that's an indicator of global cooling is as absurd as to say that's an indicator of global warming. "It's an environmental condition that attracts attention, but to link it to global warming is such a leap that is shows what I would consider a naive or simple understanding of events."

He said the whole climate change debate had become "contaminated by speculation" by scientists, campaigners and journalists. "If you stand back, the evidence suggests that we don't have catastrophic change on our hands. If anything, the evidence over the last 10 or 15 years suggests that the global climate system isn't as sensitive as some of us first thought to changes in greenhouse gases.".....

The Auckland academic is one of many around the world whom green campaigners have labeled "skeptics." He prefers to call himself a climate change "agnostic" and has strong words for the other camp. "The whole global warming issue has become very political. Even among scientists, there are people protecting their position ... or their funding, or their ideology. Science should be open-minded. Good science thrives on debate and discussion and not the reverse. What's happened is the reverse - you claim consensus and marginalize anyone who disagrees with the mainstream. That's very unscientific."

Beyond the scientists, de Freitas said, there were other vested interests. "It's not just the scientists. It's everyone involved in the impacts, the policy people, the economists, there are whole bureaucracies .... It's a whole industry, you can't kill it off. "People like myself who utter criticisms that slow this momentum down are considered outrageous. It's very hard for members of the public to get what I consider a useful perspective of the issue."

Historical droughts in the Columbia River Basin were more severe than anything in recent memory, including the drought of 1992-93, scientists said Monday. A study of tree rings found four droughts between 1750 and 1950 that were "much more severe than anything in recent memory" because they persisted for years.

One drought that started in the 1840s lasted 12 years. Flows on the Columbia River were at least 20 percent below long-term averages and might have been much lower, said lead author Ze'ev Gedalof of the University of Guelph in Ontario. Reliable river flow records go back only about 75 years. But tree-ring data reveals how much trees grow each year, a reflection of climate. "Imagine what a drought lasting that long would do to the resources and economy of the region today," says Dave Peterson of the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Washington's College of Forest Resources.

Five other multiyear droughts were identified, around 1775, 1805, 1890, 1925, and one in the 1930s coinciding with the Dust Bowl era. The study was published recently in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association. "This is a wakeup call for the importance of drought planning, and seeking ways to restore some flexibility in Western water supply systems that have a limited ability to respond to multiyear droughts," said co-author Nate Mantua of the Climate Impacts Group based at the University of Washington. "The drought like the one indicated in the 1840s, for instance, simply hasn't been part of the modern water systems experiences."

The study is a microcosmic look at one drainage. But other research has reached similar conclusions. A much broader study covering the western United States and going back 2,000 years suggests that droughts in recent memory are indeed relatively minor.

So what do Greenies do about that inconvenient fact? Ignore it, of course!

Generally understood, but rarely publicized is the fact that 95% of the greenhouse effect is due solely to natural water vapor. Of the remaining 5%, only 0.2% to 0.3% of the greenhouse effect (depending on whose numbers you use) is due to emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases from human sources. If we are in fact in a global warming crisis, even the most aggressive and costly proposals for limiting industrial carbon dioxide emissions would have an undetectable effect on global climate. However, significant efforts to limit the emission of greenhouse gases in the United States are currently underway.

Carbon Dioxide from all coal burning worldwide comprises only 0.013% of the greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere.

In Kyoto, Japan in December 1997 former President Clinton and former Vice President Gore agreed to commit the United States to significant future reductions of carbon dioxide emissions, principally by cutting the use of fossil fuels by as much as 30% over the next 10 years. It is assumed that these drastic proposed measures will have a real effect on protecting Earth's climate-- an assertion that many climate experts are reluctant to support.

While scientists are currently searching for proof that emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are warming the planet, there exists no solid proof at this time. The strongest evidence for a problematic greenhouse effect is data generated from computer models which predict about 1.5 degrees C of warming in the next 50 years unless something is done to change the rate of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. While computer climate models may eventually be able to predict future climate change, so far the ones we have are very unreliable-- unable even to accurately predict current climate conditions using current climate data.

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Since this guy appears not to have used a control group he is a scientist in name only and his results tell us nothing. He is just another publicity-seeker like so many "scientists" today

Lead left in paint, water, soil and elsewhere may not only be affecting children's intelligence but may cause a significant proportion of violent crime, a U.S. researcher argued Friday. He said the U.S. government needs to do more to lower lead levels in the environment and parents need to think more about where their children may be getting exposed to lead. "When environmental lead finds its way into the developing brain, it disturbs neural mechanisms responsible for regulation of impulse. That can lead to antisocial and criminal behavior," said Dr. Herbert Needleman, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Needleman's team, using a technique called X-ray fluorescence, found very low levels of lead in the bones of children. Needleman cited several studies that associate crime with high levels of lead either in the bodies of those accused or in the environments they came from, including one that showed the average bone lead levels of 190 juvenile delinquents were higher than those of adolescents not charged with crimes. His study suggested that between 18 percent and 38 percent of delinquent crimes in the Pittsburgh area could be attributed to lead toxicity in the adolescents. Another one tested 300 delinquents and found those with higher lead levels reported more aggressive feelings or behavior disorders.

"The brain, particularly the frontal lobes, are important in the regulation of behavior," Needleman told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Exposure to lead, at doses below those which bring children to medical attention, is associated with increased aggression, disturbed attention and delinquency. A meaningful strategy to reduce crime is to eliminate lead from the environment of children." Taking lead out of most gasoline has contributed to a sharp reduction in the level of lead in the blood of Americans over the past 30 years. But lead is still found in paint, some types of fuel for older vehicles, older water pipes and in the soil.

Former Vice President Al Gore joined statewide elected officials in predicting that decisions Monday by the nation's largest public pension system will boost worldwide efforts by companies to control gases believed to be contributing to global warming. The actions by the California Public Employees' Retirement System come two days before the Kyoto Protocol takes effect, under which nations not including the United States have agreed to trim so-called "greenhouse gases" generated by industry and vehicles.

Democrat Gore sharply criticized the Republican Bush administration for not endorsing the international treaty, a stance he said gives California's activities "an outsized importance" because of the market impact of the nation's most populous state. "The entire global business community has to sit up and take notice and respond" because of California's actions, Gore said. The $182 billion pension fund has $41 billion invested in foreign companies. "California ... is providing the kind of leadership that the federal government in Washington has for the time being unfortunately abdicated," Gore told reporters during a conference call arranged by Democratic state Treasurer Phil Angelides....

Angelides, a likely challenger to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election next year, had pushed CalPERS to adopt the new "environmental governance program" to promote better corporate environmental practices. The fund now will nudge companies to publicly disclose the financial risks they face from climate change over the coming decades, and the steps they are taking in response. "This is not just an environmental issue, but a significant issue that will begin to show up on the balance sheets of companies in which we invest," Angelides said. He cited projections that adapting to climate change will cost companies hundreds of billions of dollars over decades.

"Just so we're clear, this hockey stick isn't a sports implement; it's a scientific graph. Back in the late 1990s, American geoscientist Michael Mann published a chart that purported to show average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years. The chart showed relatively minor fluctuations in temperature over the first 900 years, then a sharp and continuous rise over the past century, giving it a hockey-stick shape.

Mr. Mann's chart was both a scientific and political sensation. It contradicted a body of scientific work suggesting a warm period early in the second millennium, followed by a "Little Ice Age" starting in the 14th century. It also provided some visually arresting scientific support for the contention that fossil-fuel emissions were the cause of higher temperatures. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Mann's hockey stick appears five times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark 2001 report on global warming, which paved the way to this week's global ratification--sans the U.S., Australia and China--of the Kyoto Protocol.

Yet there were doubts about Mr. Mann's methods and analysis from the start. In 1998, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a paper in the journal Climate Research, arguing that there really had been a Medieval warm period. The result: Messrs. Soon and Baliunas were treated as heretics and six editors at Climate Research were made to resign.

Still, questions persisted. In 2003, Stephen McIntyre, a Toronto minerals consultant and amateur mathematician, and Ross McKitrick, an economist at Canada's University of Guelph, jointly published a critique of the hockey stick analysis. Their conclusion: Mr. Mann's work was riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Once these were corrected, the Medieval warm period showed up again in the data.

This should have produced a healthy scientific debate. Instead, as the Journal's Antonio Regalado reported Monday, Mr. Mann tried to shut down debate by refusing to disclose the mathematical algorithm by which he arrived at his conclusions. All the same, Mr. Mann was forced to publish a retraction of some of his initial data, and doubts about his statistical methods have since grown. Statistician Francis Zwiers of Environment Canada (a government agency) notes that Mr. Mann's method "preferentially produces hockey sticks when there are none in the data." Other reputable scientists such as Berkeley's Richard Muller and Hans von Storch of Germany's GKSS Center essentially agree.

We realize this may all seem like so much academic nonsense. Yet if there really was a Medieval warm period (we draw no conclusions), it would cast some doubt on the contention that our SUVs and air conditioners, rather than natural causes, are to blame for apparent global warming.

There is also the not-so-small matter of the politicization of science: If climate scientists feel their careers might be put at risk by questioning some orthodoxy, the inevitable result will be bad science. It says something that it took two non-climate scientists to bring Mr. Mann's errors to light.

But the important point is this: The world is being lobbied to place a huge economic bet--as much as $150 billion a year--on the notion that man-made global warming is real. Businesses are gearing up, at considerable cost, to deal with a new regulatory environment; complex carbon-trading schemes are in the making. Shouldn't everyone look very carefully, and honestly, at the science before we jump off this particular cliff?"

How Global Warming Research is Creating a Climate of Fear

Now that the Kyoto treaty is formally in effect, there has been an avalanche of articles by people who feel it is time to speak up and nail the nonsense for what it is. Below are just a few excerpts from a BIG article by two German experts in the widely-circulated German newsmagazine Spiegel ("Mirror").

The polar ice caps are disappearing! The Gulf Stream is soon to reverse! Right? Well, maybe. But calling such apocalyptic theories into question is becoming more and more difficult for skeptical scientists. Meanwhile, the public is getting tired of being fed a diet of fear......

The public statements made by well-known German climate researchers create the impression that the scientific fundamentals of the climate problems have essentially been solved. They claim that the scientific community has already established the conditions for taking concerted action. In this case, concerted action means reducing greenhouse gases as much as possible.

This is a view that in fact does not correspond to the situation in the scientific community. That's because a significant number of climatologists are by no means convinced that the underlying issues have been adequately addressed. Last year, for example, a survey of climate researchers from all over the world revealed that a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climatic changes.

But most researchers do believe that a shift in global climate caused by human activity is already occurring, and that it will accelerate in the future and become even more apparent. Higher temperatures and higher sea levels will accompany this shift. Scientists predict that in the more distant future, that is, in about 100 years, a substantial rise in greenhouse gas levels in the Earth's atmosphere will lead to more severe precipitation events in the northern hemisphere; some regions could experience more severe and others weaker storms.

But there are always scientists for whom, in keeping with the maxims of the alarmists in Crichton's book, these scenarios are insufficiently dramatic. For this reason, they are increasingly drawing connections between current extreme weather events and the climate shift caused by human activity. They do, it is true, tend to use cautious language in drawing such parallels and interviews become exercises in understatement. When asked such questions as: "Are high water levels on the Elbe River, the hurricanes in Florida and this year's mild winter evidence of climate catastrophe?" they respond that while this cannot be proven scientifically, some believe it to be the case. None of these statements is incorrect, but when combined they lead to the obvious conclusion that of course these weather events are proof of climate catastrophe, a statement so explicit that no one would venture to volunteer it.

The pattern is always the same. The significance of individual events is turned into material suitable for media presentation and is then cleverly dramatized. When the outlook for the future is discussed, the scenario that predicts the highest growth rates for greenhouse gas emissions -- which, of course, comes with the most dramatic climatic consequences -- is always selected from among all possible scenarios. Those predicting significantly smaller increases in greenhouse gas levels are not mentioned

Who benefits from this? The assumption is made that fear compels people to act, but we forget that it also produces a rather short-lived reaction. Climate change, on the other hand, requires a long-term response. The impact on the public may be "better" in the short term, thereby also positively affecting reputations and research funding. But to ensure that the entire system continues to function in the long term, each new claim about the future of our climate and of the planet must be just a little more dramatic than the last. It's difficult to attract the public's attention to the climate-related extinction of animal species following reports on apocalyptic heat waves. The only kind of news that can trump these kinds of reports would be something on the order of a reversal of the Gulf Stream.

All of this leads to a spiral of exaggeration. Each individual step in this process may seem harmless, but on the whole, the knowledge imparted to the public about climate, climatic fluctuations, climate shift and climatic effects is dramatically distorted....

In an article we published in the professional journal "Science" in October 2004, we were able to demonstrate that the underlying methodology that led to this hockey stick curve is flawed. Our intention was to turn back the spiral of exaggerations somewhat, but without calling the core statement into question, which is that human-induced climate change does exist. Prominent members of the climate research community did not respond to the article by engaging use in a dispute over the facts. Instead, they were concerned that the worthy cause of climate protection had been harmed.

Other scientists are succumbing to a form of fanaticism almost reminiscent of the McCarthy era. In their minds, criticism of methodology is nothing but the monstrous product of "conservative think-tanks and misinformation campaigns by the oil and coal lobby," which they believe is their duty to expose. In contrast, dramatization of climate shift is defended as being useful from the standpoint of educating the public.

The principle that drives other branches of science should be equally applicable to climate research: dissent drives continued development, and differences of opinion are not unfortunate matters to be kept within the community. Silencing dissent and uncertainty for the benefit of a politically worthy cause reduces credibility, because the public is more well-informed than generally assumed. In the long term, the supposedly useful dramatizations achieve exactly the opposite of what they are intended to achieve. If this happens, both science and society will have missed an opportunity.

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

Background

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded in the graph above: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is
maximum 4%.

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here .....